The Disappearance of Grace (24 page)

We make our way down the stairs to the first floor, all the time feeling as though we are being watched. And my guess is that we
are
being watched.

Out the front door onto the cobbles, we begin the short trek to the station house, and what I pray will be the plan to rescue my Grace.

Chapter 70

DETECTIVE CARBONE IS THERE to greet us as soon as we come through the wood doors of the police station. He's smoking, which is par for the course. But instead of his usual calm and collected demeanor, he is clearly agitated.

“Something to show you,” he states, while leading us through the vestibule, through the security doors, and into the heart of the operation. “Come. Now. Come.”

We enter into his office where Heath Lowrance is already standing before Carbone's big wood desk. The leather-coated Interpol agent stands as we enter, offers his hellos.

“New developments,” he says. “Important developments.”

“Not the least of which is this,” interjects Carbone as he comes around his desk, flipping up the screen on his laptop.

He turns the laptop around so that Alessandra, Lowrance and myself can clearly see the image. It's my Grace. Still dressed in the same black sweater and skirt she was abducted in four days ago, her dark, almost black hair parted down the center of her forehead, her eyes bloodshot and exhausted, but very much alive. In her two hands she grips a newspaper. The
International Herald Tribune
. The date printed above the headline is today's.

“Grace is alive,” I say.

“Alive,” Alessandra repeats, as if she too only now believes it.

“Did he send this?” I ask, my voice barely able to exit my mouth.

“The ‘he,'” Alessandra says. “The ‘he,' as in the man who just called you in your apartment? The overcoat man?”

“The overcoat man,” says Carbone.

“He's Taliban,” offers Lowrance. “He's calling himself Hakeemullah. No last name we can see. Tajik resistance most likely. From the village you bombed, Captain. Just like we suspected.”

I shift my eyes to Lowrance.

“You got all that from his last phone call a few minutes ago?”

“And more. But not from the phone call. From this photo of your fiancée.”

“He identified himself?”

“In transmitting proof of life, he also forwarded a statement.”

Carbone pulls a sheet of paper from a file on his desk. Hands it to me.

I am Hakeemullah. I have the infidel's wife. She is alive for now. But she will die for what the infidel has done to my village. For the death he brought to my Precious.

I read the note and re-read it several times over. Each time it says the same thing.

“What does he want?” I pose. “Who or what is Precious?”

“He's taunting you for now. Precious could be anything or anyone. Maybe his wife. His dog. His horse. His spirit. Who knows, Captain? You know what war is like. You, better than anyone standing in this room.”

“What's he doing? Why so cryptic? Why no demands? Why stay here in Venice at all?”

“He's making you suffer. First he made you wait a few days before being flushed out by our intrepid reporter.” He shoots a smile at Alessandra. “Now he's ready to communicate, but not ready to make specific demands. He took it as a compliment that we were willing to speak and perhaps negotiate with him. It offered him some kind of empowerment and feeling of being respected. He feels like the ball is in his court and he wants to play for a while. Taunt you. Give you nightmares.”

“Why?”

“Punishment for bombing his village. For what you did to his Precious. For being an American. For being a Capitalist dog…the usual story, Captain. But the good news is Grace is alive and close by and you are well enough to see her with unblinded eyes.”

I look at her on the computer screen. Look at the copy of the
International Herald Tribune
. I see the fear in Grace's face. I see her hopelessness. If I could jump into the photo and steal her away, I would. But I am just as helpless.

“Will he make specific demands eventually?” I ask.

“Almost certainly,” Carbone answers. “And soon.”

“Not soon enough,” Alessandra adds.

“But we're not going to wait for not soon enough,” jumps in Lowrance.

“You have an address,” I say, recalling my brief cell phone conversation with Carbone not a half hour ago.

“We know where he is, thanks to GPS.”

“In the building I've been living in for over a week,” I say. “Sounds impossible.”

“But not improbable,” Carbone adds. “In the empty book store. On the first floor.”

Mouth goes dry.

Carbone comes back around his desk.

“We're ready to begin our rescue operation now,” he says. “With your permission, of course.”

My mind spinning, the thought of police raiding the building where Grace is being held hostage is not exactly settling. What if Hakeemullah decides to kill her at the first sign of an incursion?

I stuff my right hand into my pocket. Feel my Grace's ring.

“Will it be safe, Detective?”

He nods, smokes.

“We will take every precaution. Surprise is on our side.” Then, going for the door. “Let's move, people. Let's go get Grace.”

I follow, my heart in my throat and my soldier's gut telling me this is way too easy.

Chapter 71

A HELMETED AND FLAK-JACKETED Alessandra Betti and Agent Lowrance occupy the lead outboard-powered boat about five boats up ahead of us. Betti is filming the operation for CNN, and any other network the freelancer can sell it too, with a small video camera. Behind them is a second boat filled with uniformed and heavily armed police. Another squad armed in body armor and helmets converge on the old two-story stone and brick building on foot. Carbone and I stand in the aft of our boat while an officer drives and a second officer records the proceedings on a video camera.

Alarmed at our sudden presence, the boats, barges and gondolas that traffic the Grand Canal all make way for us as best they can. It doesn't take long for the train of police boats to arrive at the feeder canal which runs exactly perpendicular to the Grand Canal. Because it's so narrow, the boat train is forced to proceed one by one with Betti and Lowrance's police boat taking the lead. We move slowly through the feeder canal, all the time my heart pounding in my throat, and praying I do not lose my eyesight over the strain of knowing that my Grace might be in the line of fire should this thing get ugly. I can only rely on the sight I have now and the assurance that Detective Carbone's police will work fast and efficiently. That they will save my fiancée and return her to me.

Alive.

* * *

As rapidly as Carbone's people have organized for this raid, the boat train is now slowed to a crawl as the first boat has reached the canal side of the target building.

My building.

Grace's building.

Carbone and I are located so far back that he suggests we get out and make the rest of the way on foot.

“We should, however, maintain a safe enough distance should the lead start flying, Captain,” he adds, while grabbing hold of the rungs on a slightly rusted metal ladder that is thunder-bolted into the stacked stone canal bank.

Over the radio comes some radio chatter in Italian. I have no idea what's being said. But as a soldier, I can only imagine that the heavily armed and armored police are announcing their intentions to take their places around the perimeter of the building and that they will wait for a final approval from Carbone before going in. I'm about to follow the detective up the metal ladder when the explosion knocks me off my feet onto the hard boat floor.

Chapter 72

THE EXPLOSION RIPS THROUGH the block, sending a shockwave across the feeder canal, lose brick and stone acting like shrapnel, shattering the windshield, causing the two policemen to quickly duck for cover. Carbone drops down in the boat, his head and back pounding onto my right side, bruising my ribs.

The breath is knocked out of me. But I push Carbone away and together we try and get back up on our feet. He pulls his service weapon from inside his jacket, and while the boat bobs on the now unstable canal, he goes for the metal fence.

“You stay here!” he demands.

“Not on your life!” I shout, while following him.

Chapter 73

THE SOUNDS OF SCREAMS and moans from the wounded are entirely familiar to me. So is the smell of blasted granite, acrid smoke, and detonated C-4 explosive. What's not so familiar is knowing that my fiancée could very well have perished in the ground zero of the blast. As I run to her, I feel caught up in a nightmare where the stone is quickly turning to mud and my legs are sinking into it, slowing me, drowning me.

Sirens blare from every direction. They echo off the stone walls and inside my head. Police and innocent bystanders shouting. Screaming. As I approach the building and the site of the explosion, I see the first of the dead lying on the narrow canal bank. I see several bodies lying in the water. One of the bodies is unmistakable. It's Alessandra. She is floating face down on the canal, her long black hair spread over the water's surface like a child's doll that's floating face-down in a filled bathtub. A policeman who is treading water, is attempting to fish her out.

“Grace!” I scream. “Grace!”

I'm running, but I no longer feel like I'm running. The scene before me of smoking rubble, shattered glass, a sinking boat and still-life bodies isn't real. It's a made- up dream that is manufactured inside my head. I don't feel like a participant. I feel like a helpless observer looking in. I make it to within a few feet of the building when I find that I can move no further. I can't move at all as I drop to my knees and that all too familiar pressure builds and grows behind my eyeballs.

Once more I want to scream, “Grace!”

I want to throw myself into the blast zone.

I want to grab hold of her hand and pull her away from the destruction, but I can't move anymore.

The pressure behind my eyes grows so intense, I feel like my eyeballs are about to pop out of their sockets. The vision before me begins to go gray and then black. Like my eyelids are made of steel. The steel curtains have come down and bolted shut. I fall forward and feel the cool, damp of the cobble-covered bank, and the sharp shards of shattered glass and splintered brick that pierces the skin on my cheek.

Knowing that all is lost, I fall into a deep, dark unconsciousness.

Chapter 74

WHEN I COME TO I am lying in a bed, my now-seeing eyes slowly focusing in on a white ceiling. Hospital white. It takes a moment or two for reality to sink in. For my skin to shed the sensation that makes me want to think I'm waking up from a long and vivid nightmare about my Grace being abducted and killed. But when I feel the pinch of the intravenous line having been needled into the blue vein on my left forearm, and a nervous Detective Carbone standing at the end of my bed, I know that I have not been dreaming.

I have, in fact, been living this nightmare.

“Grace,” I whisper, my voice feeling as though it's physically peeling itself away from the back of my throat. “Grace. Is she alive?”

Carbone's eyes go wide. He approaches me.

“Grace was not there,” he says, his eyes peering into mine.

“She wasn't there,” I repeat. “She wasn't in the building?”

“It was a trap. A—how you say in America—a setup. Neither Grace nor the overcoat man were inside the building when the explosive was detonated. That bookstore has been empty for some years now. No one was inside. There are no more books to be found in there, other than a few scattered editions. It was an empty space, which made it all the easier for Hakeemullah to access it with no one knowing.”

I feel at once relieved and at the same time horrified that this Taliban agent still has my Grace, and has the means to set off IEDs in the middle of tourist-filled heaven on earth like Venice.

“That bomb was meant for me.”

Carbone nods.

“Perhaps,” he says. “But it killed three others instead.”

“Alessandra Betti,” I whisper.

Another nod.

“Lowrance,” I say.

A final nod.

“They were all in the lead boat that traversed the feeder canal. They were killed instantly when the bomb exploded only a few feet away from them.”

I lie back on the pillow and feel the weight of three innocent deaths bearing upon my soul. My life is measured in the amount of casualties I can cause. My life. A soldier's life.

“Hakeemullah,” I say after a beat. “Have you heard anything from him since the blast? Did he claim responsibility? Has he attempted to make contact?”